When dealing with clients, it can be challenging to determine the right time to cross-sell, make a counteroffer, find out more about the customer, or provide additional information about your product. But decision management systems (DMS) can help businesses determine what to do and when to do it.
These sophisticated solutions can be useful for direct and indirect sales models, according to Rising Media Inc., which will present the Decision Management Summit in Boston in October. From the agenda for the conference:
What, in fact, is the key to building customer value? Decisions, decisions, decisions.
In a rapidly changing, real-time, multi-channel world awash in more data than you know what to do with, making these decisions is hard. The people who make them work at the front lines of your organization. Some of them don’t work for you but for partners, agents or distributors. For mobile, IVR, or web channels it is not people but your information systems that must make these decisions.
DMS can automate and improve repeatable business decisions, replacing more expensive and error-prone human interaction and allowing organizations to move people to areas that require more adaptive thought, human interaction, and creativity. Companies should begin by thinking about the decisions they make on how they treat customers, James Taylor, CEO of consulting firm Decision Management Solutions and author of many books about DMS, told SearchBusinessAnalytics (registration required).
Most businesses today treat everyone the same or they rely on their front-line staff to make good decisions about how to interact with them. And that works to a point, but if you have thousands of people in [a] call center, that's hard to do [sic] guarantee. So I think it's, what are the decisions you make that affect your customers, and that tells you which decisions are going to make the difference to your business objectives. They're different for everybody.
DMS could determine, for example, that the parameters justify offering a particular customer a specific discount for a specific order. Or it could recommend selling another product, based on the client's buying pattern and all the big-data information gathered about this customer.
Companies are implementing big-data solutions, but they will require systems that allow them to then automate many of the responses the information gathers, Taylor wrote in a gPress blog post. Instead, people analyze, make judgments, and create systems to handle the transactions.
When you are talking about decisions that involve real-time, streaming data in huge volumes you are talking about building systems to handle these decisions. Not visualizations or dashboards but systems that handle things like multi-channel customer treatment decisions, detecting life threatening situations in time to intervene, managing risk in real-time etc.
Whether you're a solution provider considering DMS for internal or client use or a CIO investigating this resource for your organization, it's understandable why this technology is now on your agenda. Most likely, it's on your competitors' to-do list, too.
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